Federico Fellini

Federico Fellini (20 January 1920-31 October 1993) was an Italian film director and screenwriter. He was born in Rimini in 1920 to a middle-class family, and he became a screenwriter during the 1940s. An apolitical man who had no sympathy for fascism, he repeatedly attempted to evade the draft, succeeding when an Allied air raid destroyed his medical records. After the war, he became a neorealist director, and his films often explored life in devastated postwar Italy. Over the course of fifty years, won the Palme d'Or in 1960 and was nominated for twelve Academy Awards, winning four. Fellini was a Catholic humanist who supported the dignity and nobility of the individual human being, and he disliked authoritarian institutions. Although the Italian film industry was dominated by Italian Communist Party members, Fellini was a supporter of Christian Democracy, befriending Giulio Andreotti and filming a DC political advertisement during the 1990s; however, he was opposed to the Christian right. He later became an Italian Republican Party supporter, doing another campaign advertisement for them in the 1990s. Fellini died in Rome in 1993 at the age of 73.